Collins, L 2017 ‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven’: Contemporary Women Poets and Environmental Melancholia.
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 5(1): 3, pp. 1–21, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.12
"Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. In the face of this realisation, the human subject enters a melancholic state, which, in turn, permits deeper insight into the fate of the more-than-human world. The rhetoric of loss, identified by Juliana Schiesari as a key to melancholy, can be traced throughout contemporary poetry, which offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings. This essay will explore these dynamics in a range of poems by contemporary Irish and British women, revealing an encounter between the embodied self and nature that has profound effects on the construction of the poetic subject, and on traditional approaches to form."
Collins, L 2017 ‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven’: Contemporary Women Poets and Environmental Melancholia.
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 5(1): 3, pp. 1–21, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.12
Published 30 January 2017
Copyright:© 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access: C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open-access journal.
PDF published Academia.edu, accessed on 16/10/2020
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Related links at RASCAL
Research Pioneers: A Series http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon/research-pioneers-series-0
Fired! Bibliography: http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon/fired-bibliography
Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 edited by Dr Lucy Collins: http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon/poetry-women-ireland-critical-anthology-1870-1970
